AI in Lending: Hype, or Quietly Non-Negotiable?

Mr. Ganesh Nandan Prabhu, Director, Products at PayU Finance, in conversation with Ms. Puja Sharma, Assistant Editor, IBS Intelligence.

Every lender is asking the same question about AI. Very few are answering it from the vantage point of running lending products at scale. This conversation does exactly that, no theorising, no buzzwords, just a candid look at where AI is earning its keep inside one of India’s leading digital lenders.

PayU Finance has built its name on making credit accessible, seamless and scalable through technology-led lending. So, when Ganesh talks about AI, he isn’t talking about a roadmap item or a boardroom slide. He’s talking about an operating capability, something already wired into how PayU acquires, underwrites, serves and protects its customers every day.

In this conversation with IBS Intelligence, he walks through where that capability is delivering, right now, across the lending lifecycle.

The Platform Behind It: FinnOne Neo® 8.5

Behind these operations runs FinnOne Neo® 8.5, Nucleus Software’s digital lending platform, powering PayU Finance end to end, from digital onboarding and underwriting through to loan servicing.

Conversations like this one only happen when the underlying platform holds up. For a digital lender operating at PayU’s scale, that means three things, and FinnOne Neo 8.5 is built for all of them:

1. Scale – Digital lending volumes don’t grow politely. They spike with campaigns, festivals and market moments. FinnOne Neo 8.5 is engineered to process high volumes across the loan lifecycle onboarding, decisioning, disbursal and servicing without the platform becoming the bottleneck.
2. Compliance – India’s lending market is one of the most closely regulated in the world, and the rules keep evolving. FinnOne Neo 8.5 gives lenders the controls, auditability and configurability to keep pace with regulatory change, so compliance is built into the workflow, not bolted on after it.
3. Agility – The AI use cases Ganesh describes, real-time fraud checks, smarter journeys, faster servicing, depend on a lending core that can integrate, configure and launch quickly. FinnOne Neo 8.5’s API-first, modular architecture lets lenders plug intelligence into the lifecycle wherever it creates value and take new products to market in weeks rather than quarters.

That combination: Scale, Compliance and Agility on a single platform is what allows a lender like PayU Finance to treat AI as an operating capability rather than an experiment.